Biased and unprofessional reports on German books, translation issues and life in Berlin

Thursday, 24 May 2012

David Wagner: Spricht das Kind

I sort of know David Wagner and sort of
don’t. Certainly he’s one of those people I see at all sorts of literary events
– he seems to go out a lot but then he’d probably say the same about me.
Anyway, I sort of don’t know him well enough for him not to recognise me when
we were both walking down the street with our respective daughters the other
week. Now, I was very pleased to see that David Wagner has a very tall
daughter, because most people I see at literary events don’t seem to have
children, or they only have very small children because they only got around to
having them slightly later in life than myself. And I sometimes think there’s
an invisible dividing line between people with children and people without
children, although people with children can be intensely irritating.

Anyway, shortly after the above
non-incident I was in a bookshop looking for something else entirely and came
across Wagner’s book Spricht das Kind. So I bought it because it’s obviously
about the tall daughter, and I was curious. I’d read and admired some of his
writing about Berlin, but that’s somehow much more abstract. How would a great
stylist like Wagner approach the subject of his own child?

The answer is: beautifully, thoughtfully,
intelligently, discreetly, originally. I’m struggling to think of other men who
have written about children. Children do exist in German novels but they often
seem to be props in the focus on the parents’ relationships. The most recent
exception, I suppose, was Thomas Hettche’s Die Liebe der Väter, which I didn’t
read because it was received in a very politicised way and came across as an
angry reckoning with the child’s mother and the system. Oh, and Wolf
Wondratschek’s Das Geschenk about a father and his teenage son, which I did
read some of but soon tired of.

What men do write about, of course, is
their own relationships to their fathers. And Wagner covers that ground here
too. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Spricht das Kind is billed as a novel but
is actually a collection of miniatures, something the author has excelled in
elsewhere. At just over 150 pages, it’s an afternoon’s read or something to dip
into. The chapters, if I can call them that, vary from one paragraph to five or
six pages, covering a period from 2002 to 2008 (the book was first published in
2009). The child of the title is never named but we know it’s a girl, and the
sections don’t seem to be in strict chronological order. Wagner simply
describes moments with his daughter, many of which prompt him to remember
moments in his own childhood and reflect on his own mother and father. For
instance, a game played with his daughter reminds our shaggy-dog-storyteller of
how he played as a child, how he was not allowed to hang from his father’s neck
at some point and how from then on his father seemed much smaller. And then the
child lifts him up – a neat and melancholy full circle, ending with a childish
act I presume all parents will recognise.

What’s so remarkable about the book is
this: There are a number of ways in which parents tell stories about their
children – out-and-out boasting, putting down other children and parents,
anecdotes about embarrassing moments that are actually intended to make you
think their children are wonderfully shrewd and honest. And Wagner knows that –
hell, who hasn’t heard thousands of these stories? – and while the book’s not
totally devoid of all those things, he’s always aware of what he’s telling us
and what it tells us about his narrator or himself, and he thus miraculously
avoids the "isn't she cute" trap. What we get instead is really quite deep reflection,
suffused with really quite deep love.

Regular readers will know that love is an
important and much-abused word for me. This book showed me a parent’s love that
I recognised. The wonderment at the child’s world, the projection, the search
for similarities to oneself, the laughter, the consolation. A child as an
anchor and an inspiration, a mirror that often enough throws back an image not
as positive as we’d like.

Wagner’s thoughts are punctuated by things
the child says, as the title suggests, enjoying her wordplay and her ideas
about the world. At times other voices come in too, friends telling stories
about their own children or parents. It feels almost like a lazy afternoon on a
blanket in the park, the children playing out of earshot while the parents
talk, except they go into the kind of emotional depth you only reach quite late
at night. There’s a languid narrative curve of sorts, surging in the middle as
we learn more about the narrator’s parents and his relationship to
them, falling again as the child helps him deal with life. Page 146 made me cry
for quite a long time. But there’s no conclusion, because how can you put an
end point on childhood?

Spricht das Kind is a
beautiful book about being a child, a parent and a parent’s child. The
back-cover blurb on the paperback pitches it slightly too low, presumably aiming for impulse
buyers looking for a light, amusing read. While it has its light, amusing
moments and is life-affirming on the whole, it’s much more than that. The publishers say Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood is never far away, but I can't say I noticed that. What I did notice was the sophisticated language on a level that might seem incompatible with the subject-matter, but never actually did. Ditch the
parenting manuals and read it.